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Do Portland-area electro-pop act Kye Kye a favor: Never call them a Christian band

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Camas, Wash.-based quartet Kye Kye's second LP, "Fantasize," dropped on Jan. 21, 2014. The band’s music has been featured in a number of movies, TV shows and commercials including MTV’s “Awkward,” the upcoming film "Day One," and commercials for Samsung and Jawbone.
(Shaun Mendiola)

Speaking
from the road as they tour behind their fine new album, "Fantasize," which dropped on Tuesday, Jan. 18, none of the three siblings
and one in-law who make up the Camas, Wash.-based band says anything for a few
seconds. Finally, sounding a bit stricken, singer Olga Phelan breaks the
silence: "It's a sore subject."

On its
face, Kye Kye's music doesn't have anything to do with Christianity. The
group's lush, airy synths, overlaid with Phelan's fluttering soprano, sound
more like they belong on a mixtape with blogosphere-approved electronic acts
like M83 and Washed Out than alongside a Christian-rock or gospel act. Jesus
plays no role in the record's lead video single, "Honest Affection," a
cinematic love story set in World War II-era Japan, and He is nowhere to be
found on the well-styled foursome's hipster-friendly Instagram feed.

There's no
denying, though, that spirituality figures into Kye Kye's music. The band's
name derives from a Greek symbol for Christ, and on "Fantasize"as well as the group's 2011 debut, "Young Love," Phelan sings, often
subtly, about God, faith and salvation. She and her bandmates don't deny their
religiosity — "I am a believer," Phelan says — but they're leery of the
Christian genre tag.

"Today,
Christian music is almost a genre, like country music — it all sounds a
particular way. To say we're a Christian act," he argues, "would be wrong in
the same way as calling us a country act."

And Phelan
adds that the Christian label excludes would-be fans. "It puts up walls that shut
out everyone else," she says. "I'm not trying to tell people that I'm Christian
and they should be Christian. I'm just being honest, telling people what I'm
going through — just like every other song."

Thus Kye
Kye finds itself walking the same thin line as many spirituality-inspired
artists before it, from late-'70s Bob Dylan to Pedro the Lion's David Bazan:
making music that feels true to one's faith, but without freaking out
nonreligious listeners. And, from its home just outside one of America's most
godless cities, the band is seeing some success.

In 2012, Kye Kye turned to
fans for help funding its independent production of "Fantasize," raising more than $40,000 in 30 days. It has the
imprimatur of influential Portland music-licensing agency Marmoset, and its
songs have soundtracked films, television series and commercials. Currently on
a national tour, the group will jet off to New Zealand later this month for a
festival gig.

For this
family band, music was omnipresent even before it became their profession.
Raised by musically inclined Estonian immigrants — Phelan and Yagolnikov were
born in the former Soviet republic — the siblings of Kye Kye grew up tinkering
with instruments.

"Our dad
played a little of everything," Yagolnikov recalls. "There was one point where
he picked up the saxophone and tortured all of us by learning it." (The elder
Yagolnikovs are recording artists too, Phelan notes, and are "fairly known" in
Russia.)

In 2010, after collectively experiencing what
Yagolnikov calls a "weird mini-midlife crisis," the siblings Yagolnikov (plus
Phelan's soon-to-be husband) decided to parlay their musical upbringing into a
career, quitting their day jobs and starting work on their first record.

Since then,
they've followed an unconventional music-industry model, assembling a team that
includes a manager, a booking agent and a publicist while intentionally
remaining unsigned. What might be called the everything-but-the-label plan,
Yagolnikov half-jokingly calls the "everything-but-the-money" plan. But, he
says, it's a long-term business strategy, allowing the band to retain creative
control and gradually build a following as it awaits the right opportunity.

"It's like
any small business," he observes. "You have to spend a lot of money the first
couple years, and then it starts being returned."

Or so Kye
Kye hopes. The group's viability doesn't depend on reaching secular listeners;
after all, Christian contemporary musicians such as tobyMac, MercyMe and
Casting Crowns have achieved success without ever venturing outside what's
sometimes called the "Christian-music ghetto." But Kye Kye doesn't want to stay
within those walls — and it wants even less to keep others out. Instead, the
band might find more in common with an artist like the religious-but-private
indie darling Sufjan Stevens, who has managed to write songs about Christianity
while avoiding the stigmatization that overtly religious acts might face from
the mainstream. For its guiding lights, though, Kye Kye isn't necessarily looking
in that direction.

"Whether
it's a Sufjan Stevens song or a Lady Gaga song, the reason you connect with
music is because that person is being honest," says Yagolnikov. "Really, we
look up to artists who are wearing their heart on their sleeve."